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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 67-iv House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE
DARFUR, SUDAN: CRISIS, RESPONSE AND LESSONS
Wednesday 9 February 2005 MR JAN EGELAND and MR OLIVER ULICH Evidence heard in Public Questions 152 - 178
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
1. This is a corrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2. The transcript is an approved formal record of these proceedings. It will be printed in due course. Oral Evidence Taken before the International Development Committee on Wednesday 9 February 2005 Members present Tony Baldry, in the Chair Mr John Battle Hugh Bayley Mr John Bercow Mr Tony Colman Mr Piara S Khabra Tony Worthington ________________
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Jan Egeland, Under‑Secretary‑General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, and Mr Oliver Ulich, Humanitarian Affairs Officer, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, examined. Q152 Chairman: Mr Egeland, thank you very much for coming and giving evidence to us this afternoon. I know that you need to get away fairly promptly and so, if it is convenient to you, we will start fairly promptly. I suspect that a number of my colleagues will join us shortly. If you do not mind, we are going to take this in two parts, although a lot of the answers may have read across, but we will start, if we may, with Darfur and go on to the Tsunami. On Darfur, as you know, most of the Committee (six of us) were in Darfur last week. We spent a day, respectively, in North, South and West Darfur. We were, I think, as distressed by what we saw as we were impressed by the response of the international community: distressed by the huge numbers of internally displaced people, impressed by the work being done by the international community, NGOs and others. During the time we were there the International Commission of Inquiry reported, and we noted the very careful wording of their report, that, whilst not being genocide, these were crimes against humanity, war crimes as heinous as if they were genocide. My understanding is that the UN Security Council was meeting, I think, both yesterday and today on Sudan. I do not know whether you have any information on where they have got to on a referral to a special prosecutor on all of that, or do you have any further information about what the UN Security Council has done so far as Sudan is concerned, either yesterday or today? Mr Egeland: Thank you very much, first of all, for inviting me and the United Nations here. I am joined by Oliver Ulich, who is heading the Sudan desk in OCHA (the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs). The situation in Sudan and Darfur is bad, and I fear it is going to be even worse in the future unless the security situation improves. The Security Council has, in dealing with it over the last couple of days, discussed the new UN operation there. They have certainly also been looking at the Commission of Inquiry. The attitudes in the Council vis‑à‑vis the International Criminal Court are well‑known. One of the main recommendations of the Independent Commission of Inquiry of the UN is to refer the situation in Darfur and the crimes against humanity there committed to the International Criminal Court. There are key Member States in the Security Council who do not recognise the court, and I believe they are still consulting on the issue. Seen from the humanitarian point of view, what is happening in Darfur certainly amounts to crimes against humanity, it is on‑going, it is armed men fighting defenceless unarmed civilians and it has to stop. Q153 Hugh Bayley: Can you just give us an overview, your assessment of the international humanitarian response, its speed, its effectiveness, and how within that the UN itself has performed? Mr Egeland: Yes, I would be delighted to do so. I may actually refer briefly to the note that we have prepared for you and which I have just distributed. It was made by my office in the last couple of days for this occasion.[1] Q154 Chairman: I will make sure that this note is attached as part of the evidence to the Committee. Mr Egeland: Thank you very much. First, I believe it is important to see over this two‑year period that the emergency has been building. We have developed a time‑line for you, and you will see that in the course of the year 2003 it started as an insurgency. There was a disproportionate reaction by the Government and their allies, the Janjaweed militia. The UN alerted the world, together with non‑governmental organisations like the MSF, from September onwards, that this was indeed the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, which I called it and my colleagues and the Secretary-General in November and December. We did already in September of 2003 launch the first Great Darfur Initiative, which was an appeal for $23 million from the international community. It was a slow donor response, unfortunately. The world had not yet woken up to the gravity of the situation. In 2004 this situation slowly changed. I was still myself feeling it was hard to get attention in January and February. Our special envoy, Ambassador Tom Vraalsen, repeatedly visited Darfur. We did, however, have complete access failure in the sense that the Government of Sudan denied the humanitarian community, including the UN, to operate freely within Darfur, and people were dying at an increasing rate. Finally, I had success in appearing before the Security Council on 2 April, and I believe that was a very important turning point, because the Security Council, which before had been reluctant to hear about Darfur, then had a full briefing in an informal session. I went to the noon briefing and it was very well attended by the international media and we got headlines. In April we asked for $150 million. Many countries started to react very positively, including the United States and the United Kingdom, the European Union. The Security Council started to discuss the possibility of sanctions. I think that was crucial in the access restrictions being lifted finally in May and June, first for the UN agencies and then for our non‑governmental partners. In the course of the summer and the early autumn our response built, in my view too slowly. We had too little money and some of the humanitarian partners were too slow in deploying when access restrictions were lifted. In the course of the autumn, however, we got a bigger humanitarian response and we were at one point close to being able to cover all needs. At the end of the year the situation worsened, and you will see that in the course of this winter the situation has actually worsened again. On page five you will see a very important indication of the number of new internally displaced. There are three very bad periods, the one period of November to December of 2003 where in North Darfur the number of IDPs really exploded, then the period from March to April of last year where in West Darfur the Janjaweed militia burnt down countless villages and we reached one million internally displaced by June of last year. Since last autumn there has been a relentless increase in the number of new internally displaced, both in South Darfur and in West Darfur, and we now have 1.8 million displaced in Darfur. We have also mapped for you our access to the internally displaced. We had our best access defined as restrictions, or lack thereof, of both a political and security nature last June, July when we were able to reach 90 per cent of the people in need. This has worsened of late and we are now able to reach 88 per cent of a much greater population. Altogether we are not reaching some 400,000 civilians. The international response, and I was very pleased to hear that you were impressed by the work of my humanitarian colleagues on the ground, have been able to employ around 1,000 new aid workers, Sudanese and international, every month since April of last year and we now have 9,100 humanitarian workers on the ground. Still we are behind in many areas, as you will see on page 8, in terms of food, clean water, primary health, etcetera. We are covering it from half to three‑quarters. The area where we are really behind is outside of the camps where the general population are seeing worsening conditions. In terms of food, we have been able last month (January) to reach 1.2 million. Our capacity would be to actually give more than two million people food, and, as you will see, also in sanitation we are behind, mostly because of security problems in these regions. Q155 Hugh Bayley: Could you say a little bit about how the UN coordination operations work? I know you have OCHA and they are doing a good coordination job, but in practice in an individual camp ‑ I think we visited five ‑ what you see on the ground appears to an outsider visiting briefly to be a case of whoever got there first gets on and organises things. Is that inevitably how things work when you face a humanitarian crisis: you deploy different people to different areas, or you look at how people deploy themselves and then capitalise on the capacity they have on the ground? Are there lessons the UN should learn from the way you have responded to this very large crisis? Mr Egeland: There are a number of lessons, and I will be very blunt, open and frank with you. I have not been satisfied either with the donor response nor with the humanitarian community's response to the Darfur emergency. I think we were late as a UN community, I think the donors were late, I think the Security Council were late, I think most of our Member States were late in recognising the gravity of the crisis and really addressing it in a forceful manner. In terms of coordination, I think, however, it has not been as bad as it may seem. Already in February of last year, OCHA (the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) deployed a sizable group of people within 48 hours after we got our first access to the area thanks in a large part to DFID here, who provided much of the stand‑by personnel that we used. Since that time we have had coordination teams in all Darfur capitals, the three provincial capitals, and now in several other areas. Camp management has been one of the gaps in our response. There is no one agency with responsibility for internally displaced as there is for refugees through the High Commission for Refugees. What we have done, however, is to assemble all the non‑governmental organisations and all the agencies from that February response and urged, requested, recommended agencies to take on camp management in the various different areas; and I would say now we have much better, not ideal in any way as you could see, camp management in all the major camps in Darfur, and we are blessed with a good relationship with the non‑governmental organisations who are providing 80 per cent of the personnel on the ground. Q156 Hugh Bayley: You said that it was fortunate that DFID had a stand‑by team of people to work on humanitarian crises which you were able to deploy. Is that something that there is a shortage of. How many major donors have similar teams and why was DFID able to deploy their people but other donors were not able to deploy in the same way? Mr Egeland: The UK is one of our main partners in emergency response. I have to admit also that the Norwegian Government, which is my own government, has a good response capacity, as do the Swedes. We are working with the Dutch; we are working with Canadians. I would say maybe six, seven countries ‑ the Danes as well ‑ now have that kind of stand‑by capacity. This is not enough, and it is too much north‑west. In Darfur we should have had more Arabic speakers; we should have had more Muslim staff members to put in early on. This is why I have initiated a humanitarian response review as well as a real‑time evaluation of the Darfur effort. The latter is specific for Darfur ‑ what lessons are there to learn? ‑ and the former is a big global initiative to fill the gaps we presently have in the system. We have a gap in terms of camp management for internally displaced - glaringly clear in Darfur in the early days - we have a gap in terms of water and sanitation, we have a gap in terms of shelter for IDPs and we have a gap in a terms of stand‑by arrangements within Africa, within the Arab world, Asia and Latin America. I am confident we will be able to fill several of these gaps in the course of the next months, and I am in contact with several donors, including the UK Government, on that. I had a meeting with Hilary Benn this morning on this precise matter. Q157 Chairman: You have conceded that the UN, indeed other donors, were late, but could I take you back to page two of your briefing. On page two you very kindly tell us that on 7 November 2003 OCHA warns that Darfur is going to be facing its worst humanitarian crisis since 1988 and access for humanitarian workers is non‑existent some areas. No‑one seems to take any notice of that. No‑one in the international community seems to take any notice of that. So on 5 December you say Darfur "has quickly become one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world". I am not quite sure how you could actually have phrased that more strongly, and yet again no‑one seems to take any notice. We seem to live in a world where the only way in which people take any notice is if the television cameras arrive and actually start to take footage and to put it on our screens. Of course, if you have, as clearly happened here in Darfur, the Government of the Sudan preventing access, as we know, for a long time humanitarian workers, NGOs and others, it is very, very difficult for the television cameras to get in. What I would like your help on is this. How within the machinery of the UN or the Security Council can we improve the mechanism whereby if you say, "This is a humanitarian crisis", there is some kind of flagging, either a red flag or some sort of alert that no‑one can then pretend afterwards that they did not know the seriousness of what you were telling them? Mr Egeland: I think you are pointing a finger at one of our biggest global problems at the moment. We have at the same time 20 neglected and forgotten crises and some of them are appallingly bad. I could now say Eastern Congo is probably the worst crisis in the world at the moment; ten or 100 times worse than the Tsunami crisis at the moment on the Indian Ocean beaches. A thousand people die every day from preventable disease in Eastern Congo; that is 365,000 per year; it is more than three million people dead since the late 1990s, and still our response is inadequate and the international attention is inadequate. In a way Darfur of last winter is happening to an extent in the Congo today. What we need is a predictable response, even though we do not have the television cameras to help us as we had in the Tsunami response. We need a predictable donor response. We should be able to push an alarm button and we should then get money, and we should be able to push an alarm button and then get stand‑by capacity personnel and in-kind resources. That is the whole purpose of this humanitarian response review, and I am very happy to see that the UK Government also now has an initiative of looking at predictable funding. Minister Benn has, for example, proposed a fund that will be at the availability of the Secretary-General, me as much as the relief coordinator, that we could use in the Darfur kind of situation or in Eastern Congo and which would not have been used in the Tsunami response because the money was coming by itself. I hope we will in the course of these coming months get such a donor response, a predictable agency response as well with more stand‑by capacity. Q158 Chairman: But we also need to have agreement from the UN machinery that there is a mechanism whereby you can say a particular crisis has got into the red stage or a stage one stage, or some signalling, flagging up mechanism, where the whole international community has to recognise this is extremely serious, this is critical, this is one of the worst humanitarian crises; otherwise it all becomes very subjective, often depending upon people's historic associations in a particular part of the world and it all becomes very hit and miss. Mr Egeland: You are so right. If I am, as Emergency Relief Coordinator with the General Assembly mandate, the one supposedly in charge of coordinating humanitarian efforts in the world, if I say it is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world we should have gotten more money from donors to our already issued appeals, we should have seen an initiative from the Security Council in asking for a briefing and we should have ideally seen pressure on the Sudanese Government to giving access. I think the trend line is a positive one. I have more and more governments now coming to us saying, "We recognise that there are too many forgotten and neglected emergencies and we are willing to give more attention to it." I have been invited, for example, much more in the last few months to the Security Council than in my first months to address such crises, and I have also alerted them to some early warning situations, and I could say that Chad and Guinnea in Africa are rapidly deteriorating and could become crises. Q159 Chairman: I do not in any way want to add to your work load, but I think we would be interested in knowing from you by way of a written note what you now consider to be significant humanitarian crises which are not being followed through and the early warning system: because I think some of the things that we are going to have to try and work out is how do countries such as the UK make the situation different.[2] We are all conscious when a crisis blows up the response of the UN Secretary-General or the lead agencies to appoint a representative in the country concerned, who, by hook or by crook, has to bludgeon, bluff and cajole everyone to coordinate and actually get something going. When DFID submitted evidence to us on Darfur they said, and I think it is only fair to put this quote to you in full, "The UN in Sudan suffered a leadership vacuum between March and June 2004 and the work of the various agencies needed much more effective coordination." They also said in their evidence to us, "The change of local UN leadership at critical times with no real plans to bridge the gap made it hard for the UN Country Team to reorientate themselves towards Darfur." I appreciate that Mr Kapila leaving the Sudan as the humanitarian coordinator is an internal matter for the UN, and I am not particularly interested in the details about why he left. What I am concerned about is that four months, according to DFID, seem to have passed with no‑one actually having an effective grip on what was happening in Darfur. Is there not a lesson to be learned here. If one of the Secretary-General's personal representatives or the key player is not, for whatever reason, gelling with the Government or just making it, those sorts of changes should happen more quickly and that having a situation where it is limping along is really unacceptable? Mr Egeland: Again, you are right. We should fill all leadership gaps immediately in that kind of situation. There should even be an overlap between humanitarian coordinators, as we call them. I think DFID's account is incomplete, however. Mukesh Kapila left at the end of March. Before that time we had identified his successor, another Briton, Alan Doss, who was perhaps the most experienced humanitarian coordinator and had led very successfully the effort in Sierra Leone, which is one of our success stories. We asked the Sudanese Government, as we have to in the case of resident/humanitarian coordinators, for the approval of the Sudanese Government and they rejected his candidature because he was British, being from one of the troika of the coordinators of the peace process. This was a completely new thing, that Norwegians, Brits and Americans could not be accepted as such. I think it was because they did not want necessarily a strong leader in place at the time. We did also put from OCHA Headquarters immediately in March Kevin Kennedy in charge. He is the most experienced field operator we perhaps have had. He was the one who took over all operations the day after the bomb killed our Sergio Viera de Mello in Baghdad and has a lot of experience. Again, the Sudanese Government did not recognise his credentials in this period and they said, "No, he is American and he is interim", and so on. So this was the bleakest period for us. We had no access to Darfur and they, the Government, made all sorts of problems for us. The Security Council had not really started to put the kind of pressure they should have on the Sudanese Government, which they later did when they threatened with sanctions, and, when they did that, immediately we got more access and we got also the humanitarian coordinator (which was the second or the third we had nominated) approved, which is Manuel de Silva, who is there now. Q160 Chairman: I would have thought within the UN family the receiving countries should be, if you like, blind to the original nationality of someone holding a UN passport, because effectively you become a member of the United Nations team? Mr Egeland: Yes. Q161 Chairman: But does this not flag up perhaps the need for us all collectively to be building up humanitarian leadership capacity both at a UN level and also at an NGO level in Africa as a whole? Mr Egeland: Yes, we should, and we will hope in the course of this humanitarian response review I just mentioned to build up a greater number of experienced humanitarian coordinators. We have too few of them at the moment. Of course, you do not get unlimited people who want to subject themselves to that kind of around the clock work in non‑family stations where, you know, you basically get little gratitude and a lot of work. However, we need more of them. We have some excellent ones, but there are too few and we will pick up more. Q162 Mr Khabra: As you know, you have heard about the UN leadership crisis and the problems which the UN is facing in Darfur at a time particularly when the bulk of various agencies needs much more effective coordination. The question is why has it taken such a long time for the humanitarian community to agree on responsibilities for camp coordination? Is the UN and the international humanitarian system more broadly equipped to deal with the internally displaced persons' crisis? Mr Egeland: There are gaps in our response to crises of internal displacement, yes. I would say the areas where the gaps are clearest is in camp management, where we have to have more agencies having more capacity similar to the one we have through the High Commission for Refugees in refugee situations. The High Commission for Refugees is unable or without a mandate in many of the internal displacement situations to take this kind of responsibility, so we have to build up elsewhere. I would not accept that there was a coordination vacuum in Darfur; there was more a general response vacuum. When OCHA deployed 15 staff from headquarters, DFID and others, to Darfur as early as February 2004 it was to coordinate a response. There were as many coordinators as we were people from UN agencies in total, and there were also only a handful of NGOs at that time in Darfur. What was inadequate was the general availability of willing and able agencies to come to Darfur. I think some agencies were too late; I think many NGOs were too late. They simply did not get people to go to Darfur at the time. Some non‑government organisations who would be able to deploy 100 people to the Tsunami victims in two weeks got ten people to Darfur in two months. All of this we have to self‑critically look at now as a humanitarian community, and camp management is one of those issues. Q163 Mr Khabra: The next question I want to ask you is you know that there was a need for international agencies involved in the production of internally displaced people that they must coordinate their activities. There was a need for developing a strategy. Therefore the question is: what is the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs doing to ensure that IDPs are able to participate in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and integration, which is important because they are the people who are affected? They must be involved in the decision‑making process; they should be part of the strategy itself? Mr Egeland: Indeed; you are so right. I would like my colleague, Oliver Ulich, to complement my answer here. We do need to consult with the internally displaced to make sure that their return and relocation is voluntary. They have no trust and confidence in the Government of Sudan at all and there have been too many cases of enforced relocation. At the same time our collective effort and aim is, of course, that people should return to the villages when it is safe to do so. We are trying to consult with the elders, we are trying consult with the people, we are trying to make them visit the villages and then discuss among themselves if they want to go back, and then we want to have prescience among them when and if they go back. Fewer people go back than are displaced at the moment. What is happening is still ethnic cleansing, "scorched earth" techniques in many places, and we see more and more IDPs. There is an agreement between the Government of Sudan and the IOM (the International Organisation for Migration) to oversee it being a voluntary return, and there is also now an agreement between us, as the UN, through UNHCR with the Government to ensure that it is assisting in voluntary future return. Mr Ulich: Just to add two quick points. One is that the same principle that IDPs have to be fully consulted, including women, applies also to relocation. At the moment, because of the lack of security, as Mr Egeland said, return is happening only in very small numbers, but a lot of the camps, because of the new arrivals coming in, are becoming overcrowded and cannot sustain the huge numbers in those camps - Kalma camp, which you may have visited, was one example, Abu Shouk in the North as well - and, when the local authorities want to relocate IDPs to other location, that in the past has created a lot of tension because a lot of the relocation sites were in areas that the IDPs did not think were secure, there were no water sources, etcetera, etcetera. I think we have made progress on that as well. There is much more consultation now with the local authorities and also with the IDPs themselves. They are being taken to the alternative sites, the local authorities have started listening to their views and I think that tension has gone down quite a bit; so relocation is in the same kind of category as return in that sense. As Mr Egeland also said, the standards and the mechanisms have been agreed; they are in these two agreements with IOM and UNHCR. We have to make sure they are fully applied and implemented, and we need the full cooperation of the authorities for that and will continue to seek that and alert others when we do not get that cooperation. Q164 Mr Khabra: In relation to the same issue, which is an important issue actually, could you tell us what role the International Organisation for Migration played in Darfur particularly as regards the planning and management of the IDP's voluntary return, because they have got to return to their place of birth or wherever they have lived for years. How effective and accountable is the IOM, an organisation which is not formally part of the UN system. Would you tell us? Mr Egeland: Yes, the International Organisational for Migration is not a UN agency; it has an independent mandate. However, it participates in our UN Country Team meetings. The International Organisation for Migration is now responsible for overseeing voluntary return and relocation, as we just described it, they are also responsible for camp management in some regions and they are providing general assistance in a number of areas. They are part of the Country Team, they work well as a team player and they are funded in the normal way by UN Member States. There was concern, I should be frank and honest to say, with the way the relocation agreement came about, because it was at the request of the Sudanese Government that the IOM accepted this. However, it was also raised with the Special Representative of the Secretary-General, Jan Pronk, who agreed to this general initiative. This initiative should, however, have been first discussed with the Country Team and the non‑governmental organisations so there was a general buy‑in to the agreement before it was announced as a bilateral agreement by the Sudanese Government and the IOM, and I think we have all learnt from that. Q165 Mr Khabra: Could you tell me, I know that if people have been victims of violence, rape or mention anything disparate regarding their property, it is a big task to convince them to return to wherever they have lived their years and their place of birth because some of them will be reluctant to come back for reasons of security? Mr Egeland: Yes. Q166 Mr Khabra: I do not know whether the United Nations or the rest of the international community are going to provide them with the reassurance that they will be safe. How will they be protected? They must have lost lots of property as well to help them survive. Sometimes they are small communities and they would like to stick together, to return to the same place. Is there any process which has been started already to talk to these people if that happens, "Would you like to go back to your place or would you like an alternative settlement somewhere else?" So these are big issues actually? Mr Egeland: These are very big issues. People will not return before the violence has ended, before the Janjaweed and other militias have been disarmed, before the rebels stop their provocative attacks against the police and going in and out of the villages attracting counter attacks on the villages, when the guerrillas retreat and never fight but let the civilian population take the full brunt of the attacks by the militias. All of these things have to end. Then we have to have people in all of the return places, overseeing, monitoring, being among the people to ensure that they are not re-attacked, and we need to have a big assistance programme so that they can have food every day as they return and also can have help to restart their livelihoods. A lot of things have to happen. Q167 Mr Bercow: Mr Egeland, I apologise for missing your opening remarks and answers. What is your estimate of the current death-rate on a daily basis in Darfur? Mr Egeland: We have been prevented from having new mortality surveys, so we do not know. Q168 Mr Bercow: By whom? Mr Egeland: By the Government. We have asked through the World Health Organisation ‑ this is my understanding of the situation ‑ to do a new mortality survey. We did one last summer and we found at that time that there were around 10,000 deaths per month among the internally displaced, which was around that time 1.2 million people. I know now that the mortality within the camps is lower, but it is probably as high or higher in parts of the countryside, and in the future it may go up further because people's livelihoods are gone, because of the lack of security and the continued violence. Q169 Mr Bercow: Do you have any idea of the numbers of deaths taking place daily as a result, not of humanitarian failing, but of violence? Mr Egeland: No, we do not know, but I would say that it is in the many thousands every month. How many we do not know. Q170 Mr Bercow: We went to Kalma camp and found the conditions there horrifying. We also went to Abu Shouk, sometimes regarded as the so‑called five‑star camp. I think we were struck by a rather alarming sense that there was a semi‑permanence to that camp, with marginally better housing; and the combination of that marginally better housing and the palpable lack of security outside the camps meant that, frankly, the prospect of any substantial voluntary return was years, if not, God forbid, decades away. Recognising that your responsibility is a humanitarian one but also that the link between the humanitarian crisis and the crisis of butchery, for want of a better term, is an inextricable link, may I ask you whether you think the African Union force needs greater numbers, more equipment, or an extended mandate or a combination of all three? Mr Egeland: It is probably a combination of all three. I would say the mandate is the least of the problem, but we have now 1,800 soldiers, observers and police from the African Union there. We were supposed to have more than 3,000 by November, the latest December. I agree with your general assessment. The world is failing Darfur and it is beyond me that one year after the world woke up to the Darfur horrors we are still having the situation out of control. I would say that the humanitarian community is doing a big job. I am proud of our aid‑workers there, who are burnt out in the course of months and we have an enormous turn‑over, but we are the plaster on the wound, the wound has to be healed and it can only be healed by much tougher political pressure against the parties, including the employment of sanctions, I think, and much stronger military presence. There should be many thousands of soldiers there from the African Union who are doing a great job, the few who are there. They are taking risks, they are proactive, but they are far too few. Q171 Mr Bercow: Can I finally press you a little bit on this question of numbers. We all agree about the importance of logistical back‑up and satellite equipment, and so on and so forth, but on the question of numbers would you go along with John Garang, who has called I think only yesterday for a force of up to 30,000 Sudanese and international troops to stop the fighting, or, indeed, the person who I think led the peace‑keeping operation in Rwanda who suggested that a figure of 44,000 might be required? We are talking, are we not, about piddlingly inadequate numbers of the African Union force, notwithstanding the tremendous work that they are trying to do and the weight of responsibility on their shoulders. Are you not concerned that they might be being set up? Mr Egeland: It is far too late. Remember there was some talk of a force of 5,000 last autumn. They seem to have settled for about 3,300. No, it is too small, but we are just halfway even to that and we are now in February 2005. There has to be a better way of making the African Union deployable, and the UN as an institution and you as Member States should be really looking at possibilities for making them deployable. Maybe 5,000 might be more or less adequate; I think more than that is needed if we are to disarm the militias. Q172 Mr Bercow: This is very revealing. I do not know whether in the course of your visit you might have a chance to pop along to 10 Downing Street in the hope that the Prime Minister will afford you the hospitality of a cup of tea, because if you were to do that and he were to oblige, perhaps you might put it to him that, remembering the very important point that he made three years ago that if ever there were a repetition of Rwanda Britain would have a moral duty to act, it might be a good idea for him to have a word with General Jackson to see if we can produce five, six, seven thousand troops from Britain? Mr Egeland: I think the UK Government is sharing the frustrations that you are expressing, that I express, and there have been many offers to the African Union to help them deploy. It is one of the big lessons learned from Darfur, that it is not deployable at the moment. It should become deployable. Whether a western force would be able to avoid future blood‑shed and chaos and insecurity, we do not know. Darfur has now become a place of so many militia groups, so many ethnic groups, so many fundamentalist groups, so many rebel groups that, yes, it would take a very big force and the immediate priority should be to make the African Union a much stronger force. Q173 Mr Battle: I appreciate the answers you have recently given, but to imagine in a slightly better world there is more done on security, even if there are more helpful responses for peace‑keeping troops, even if that were to happen, the "scorched earth" policy, the destruction of over 800 villages, even with people returning, they are not planting now. To my mind, that suggests that even if people are encouraged to return from the camps they will have no livelihood at all. Do you anticipate a general food shortage, do you anticipate a food security crisis in the Sudan next year and are you flagging that up now? Mr Egeland: I do, indeed, foresee a food security crisis in large parts of Sudan in the course of this year and next year and Darfur may well be the worst of these areas. However, there are other parts of Sudan too where we have all sorts of alarm clocks ringing and lights blinking; even in the east there are not very positive developments. The one glimmer of hope is that we have a peace agreement north/south and we need to make that become a reality, we need to invest now in the return of the internally displaced. We launched last autumn a work plan, as we called it, which is a big appeal to the international community for $1.5 billion. If we get that fully funded, I think we will be able to cater for the return of the internally displaced, to secure livelihoods for most of them and also to provide food for those in need. At the moment we are really under-funded in this appeal; we are not even close to the kind of donor response that there was to the Tsunami victims. The International Red Cross, which is doing a very good job outside of the camps and in the countryside, say that famine‑like situations could arise soon, especially in this hunger period, which is just before the summer, our summer. We could have famine‑like situations in the countryside of Darfur. Q174 Tony Worthington: Pursuing that a little bit, trying to get your head round what is going on in Sudan is very difficult ‑ I think we have all struggled with that ‑ but it seems to me that the people who are winning are the Sudanese Government. What they have is a strategy of clearing the land of people who are opposed to them or about whom they are not certain with their agents who come to be called the Janjaweed, and so on, and now that it is working so effectively they do not have to burn the villages, they just have to frighten the villagers. They go to camps and there they are looked after by the international community with no Sudanese input of any significance whatsoever. The camps are ringed by Sudanese Army and Police Force, who give no service, as does the rest of the Sudanese Government gives no service, to their own people. Is that a totally unfair assessment? Mr Egeland: No, I think that is a fair assessment, but one needs to add a few other things. The central Government has failed, they have failed their own people in Darfur systematically and along the lines that you say. It is, however, wrong to say that you have bad guys and good guys and the good guys are the rebels. The rebels have killed aid‑workers; they have set up their own people to be massacred in the way they behave; they are splintering off more rapidly than you can believe. There is no unity of command, there are more and more groups, and they are not negotiating either with the Government in good faith or in good fortune; so I would say that the world has to put much more pressure on all. There are bad buys and bad guys and bad guys now and they should all be under sanctions. There should be a big stick and a big carrot for them. We also have a big underlying resource crisis there and an underlying conflict between farmers and herdsmen - there is not enough place for both of them - so the ethnic tension is also part of this. Probably we have to negotiate local agreements, regional agreements and a national agreement between the guerrillas and the Government. Q175 Tony Worthington: Can I turn to the UN security guidelines and what you think about them? You get NGOs who are critical of them as being too stringent, but you know there have been deaths of humanitarian workers. You have got a UN organisation (UNSECOORD I think it is) which is there to make judgments about whether areas are secure or not. Does it have the resources? Do you feel those UN guidelines are working well? Here you have a situation where the main enemy is the Government. How do you make a country safe from its own government? Mr Egeland: We are torn here. We have enemies on all sides in Darfur. Your British Save the Children workers were actually killed by guerrillas, or former guerrillas, as they are now called, and the mines may well have been planted also by the guerrillas that killed other aid‑workers. I am frustrated by our security apparatus, because we have too little resources to put in, we are not well enough funded by our Member States to put enough security personnel there and we end up by declaring roads no‑go all the time. I am also torn between the moral imperative to help the civilians and the moral imperative of not sitting in New York or in London and sending my unarmed humanitarian field staff into impossible situations where they may be killed. We are at the moment not assisting hundreds of thousands because we think it is too dangerous to go places, and we have an obligation to cater for all. My conclusion is we should have a more robust force to protect our humanitarian workers from the African Union, or whoever, we should have more capacity on the security side and we should really have much more pressure on the parties to behave. Q176 Tony Worthington: There is a wider issue which is very disturbing in the world at the moment, the world that you work in and the world that we examine, about humanitarian space and recognition of, if you like, untouchables, people who are above the fray. In Iraq the attack on the UN was the most appalling example of that, the feeling that in Iraq there were no safe people, the symbols had gone. How do you feel about that issue within Sudan? Do you feel that there is a respect for the Red Cross or for humanitarian organisations, or is that going? Mr Egeland: Touch wood, we are not being targeted up to now like we have been systematically in Iraq and Afghanistan by groups who see us as not impartial, as we are, but as part of some western plan. In Darfur we are in the kind of situation where you, the international community, and we ourselves feel we should be there helping everybody everywhere, and we take too much risks or we are exposed to too much. The situation in Sudan is one where we are more put into a cross‑fire situations, mine situations, criminal gangs are not targeted because we are UN, not as of yet. Q177 Chairman: Finally on that point, is there a need for some new protocols, some new working, in that in the past if you had a humanitarian crisis such as that in Ethiopia in 1985, humanitarian workers went in with the full support of the state concerned. Increasingly, humanitarian workers, whether it be Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, are having to go in and the key issue is security. The only people usually who provide security are troops. Then we have concerns by NGOs and others about their role getting confused with that of the military, and so forth. Is there not a need for actually looking at these issues and coming up with some new protocols about how everyone responds to security in the relationship between the military and humanitarian workers? Mr Egeland: We do have military civil defence protocols that we, the humanitarians, have developed; we have also a framework for cooperation with military and civil defence assets. It worked wonderfully in the Tsunami response where the UK and the US and Singaporean military assets saved a whole humanitarian operation when we were operating in the roadless areas, for example, in the early days. Cooperation with military forces in war situations is highly controversial in the humanitarian community. Some of our non‑governmental partners reject the idea altogether and feel it is totally counterproductive for our safety because we will cease to be seen as neutral. In Northern Uganda and many places we have to take military transport to be able to deliver food because we are attacked by the Lord's Resistance Army and others, of course. It is a dilemma which is there even though we have guidelines. Q178 Mr Colman: Briefly following Mr Worthington's comment and your comment, which was that the rebels, the former guerrillas I think you called them, were themselves in some cases killing the aid workers and the people they were supposed to be representing. Do you think there is a problem, as happened with the Interhamwe in the aftermath of the Rwandan massacres, that in some way the humanitarian aid is going to feed the former guerrillas or rebel forces and in some way is prolonging the distress in Darfur and are there needs to have humanitarian aid guidelines which will ensure that the UN is not prolonging, if you like, a civil war and is not simply feeding the troops on the rebel side, i.e. the non‑government side? Mr Egeland: It is a very real concern in all war situations. It is my clear impression that we are avoiding this problem in Darfur at the moment. We do not have the situation which was occurring in the Camp at Goma, for example, in the Great Lakes crisis, when guerillas were all over, inside of the camps, and we fed them really and thereby part of the various rebellions. In Darfur the rebel forces are very small, they are very mobile, they go all over. They seem to be getting arms and supplies easily - all armed groups, all over - but it is not our food. As I see that, we have good monitoring of it. Chairman: Thank you very much.
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